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Old 09-07-2015, 04:49 AM   #35
Ulzgoroth
 
Join Date: Jul 2008
Default Re: GURPS Starships line errata (and some observations)

Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka View Post
It's as much a mistake to make everything available all at once in GURPS Spaceships as it is in GURPS Ultra-Tech. TL 9 soldiers can toss nukes at each other too, and none of their armor is going to stand up to that either.
There are reasons other than author-imposed style for infantry not to be playing nuke-tag. It's really hard to come up with a reason that nuclear warheads aren't a valid response to SM+15 space dreadnoughts.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Mailanka View Post
The problem with the pre-designed spaceships isn't that they don't make full use of all possible elements, or that they don't use your preferred combat paradigm, but that they don't really make for interesting combat in their own paradigms. You don't expect X-wings to toss nukes at people, because that's not in-genre. You expect them to have blaster fights with tie-fighters. But if you follow the rules and you use the written design, you won't get those blaster fights. It comes down to missiles and point defense, and that's a problem.
I think if Spaceships actually wanted to be about modeling arbitrary mostly-implausible paradigms, it very much needed to address that directly, at length and in detail.

What it did instead is give us a modular quasi-hard science system with some patches and toggles you can use for less-hard stuff.

I probably prefer the latter, really. But it seems like there's a lot of desire to make it out to be the former. And it's totally the wrong product for that.
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I don't know any 3e, so there is no chance that I am talking about 3e rules by accident.
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